He didn’t push. He let the silence do it for him. Elvi sighed. “I’m getting a picture,” she said. “I’m starting to understand what built the rings, and how their minds worked. Or mind. Even when I don’t understand how their technology works, I’m starting to see the obstacles they were trying to overcome, and that’s actually a pretty good starting point. But . . .”
“But you’re wondering how that can be good enough, when the thing they were fighting against killed them and is coming for us.”
“There’s so much about that I don’t understand. What the bullets are.”
“Scars where their attempts to break us permanently fuck up part of reality?”
“Sure. Maybe. But how? What does it do? How do they work? Can we use them to get back to wherever these things are? And how come sometimes they black out one system at a time, and then other times, it’s everywhere? Why do they blow off locality and then leave a scar or bullet or whatever it is that’s in a place and tied to a local frame of reference?”
“And how do you stop them?”
Elvi wiped away a weary tear. “And how do I stop them. Everything’s riding on this. Earth, Mars, Laconia, Bara Gaon, Auberon . . . They all die if I don’t solve this.”
“If someone doesn’t solve this,” Fayez said. “We’re one ship, and we’re on a very promising track. But we’re not the only ones looking.”
They were silent together, only the hum of the ship around them. She shifted, putting her head against his arm. He curled toward her, kissing her ear. “When was the last time you slept?”
“What’s this sleep you speak of ? Sounds nice.”
He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her gently through the cabin to the sandwich board where she slept when a sack against the wall wasn’t enough. She didn’t undress, just slipped between the slabs of gel and let them clamp gently down on her, holding her in place like a giant hand. It was the closest analog to climbing into bed under a pile of blankets, and as soon as he dimmed the lights to a sunset red-gold, she felt sleep rushing up for her like she was falling. Like she was capable of falling.
“You need anything?” he asked, and his voice was soft as a sand dune washed by a breeze. Despite everything, Elvi smiled.
“Stay with me until I fall asleep?”
“My mission in life,” Fayez said.
She let her eyes close and her mind wander. She wondered what it would be like to have Fayez in her private mind the way Xan and Cara, and maybe Burton, were in each other’s. It had to have some physical element, some center or locus of control that used the same alocal effects that let the gate builders stay connected, neuron analog to neuron analog, through whatever strange dimensions they’d traveled. Maybe if she compared brain morphology, she could find it. Real-time communication between systems would change everything. Assuming anyone was still alive to talk.
She was on the edge of dream, half convinced that the Falcon had a university campus in it and that she was preparing to give a lecture, when she roused and chuckled.
“Yes?” Fayez said, still there.
“Lee wants me to give the crew a pep talk. Help shore up morale. I told him I would.”
“Any idea what you want to say?”
“No clue,” she sighed.
Chapter Fifteen: Teresa
Time was a problem. Time was always a problem.
It started, she had learned, with the fact that simultaneity was an illusion, and “the same time” on different planets in different systems was mostly an accounting convenience that only functioned because most people were moving relatively slowly compared to lightspeed. But beyond that, the measurements of time were embedded in history. An hour had sixty minutes because mathematicians in ancient Babylon had worked in a sexagesimal system. A year was the time it took Earth to make a full transit around Sol, and that mattered even though Teresa had never been to Earth and almost certainly never would. Like the number of minutes in an hour, the width of a centimeter, the volume of a liter, the length of a year was the marker by which humanity told the story of itself.
And so, because an old planet in another system was in more or less the same position relative to its star now as it had been during the siege of Laconia, Teresa Duarte was going to wake up sixteen years old instead of fifteen. And because of how quickly that same planet spun on its axis, it was still early morning, and she was in her quarters on the Roci, drifting between wakefulness and dream.